The savagery of Pilzer's bitterness at seeing another get the bronze cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet's son, but on Hugo. As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at Hugo's expense. He christened Hugo "White Liver." When Hugo stumbled over a stone he whispered:
"White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!"
Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered:
"Still with us, little White Liver? Cowards are lucky. But your time will come. You will die of fright."
They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and then to the second, without drawing fire. There they were told to unslip their packs "and sleep—sleep!"
Fracasse passed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce must be obeyed. They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold stone wall. So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one another's breaths and heart-beats. Where last night they had thought of a multitude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing. Spaces of consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of patchwork chaos of mind. For the raw brains were not yet quite calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the day.
Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like. He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not come as a surprise. Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.
His mind was busy in the gestation of his impressions and observations since he had crossed the frontier. Definitely he knew that he was not afraid of bullets or shell fire, and in this fact he found no credit whatever. The lion and the tiger and the little wild pigs of South America who will charge a railroad train are brave. But it took some courage to bear Pilzer's abuse in silence, he was thinking, while he was conscious that out of all that he had seen and felt in the conflict of multitudinous angles of view was coming something definite, which would result in personal action, fearless of any consequences.
The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and man[oe]uvres. He loved them; he thought, student fashion, that he understood them. He liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection. The fortitude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from humiliation and heart-break. There was the rub: his father and mother and his sweetheart. He was an only son. His sweetheart was a goddess to his eyes. What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on the seashore, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers? Hadn't Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, "It is a mistake for a soldier to think too much"?
Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn. When the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town. He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.